You're about 30 years late WRT your reference. When I said "back in the day"...

I first saw the term "software priesthood" in print in Byte magazine -- it was 1976, I think. It was already in play among those of us who had already been programming for a while, and even more so among certain sectors of management.

Yep. And they're extremely difficult to deal with contextually, unless you take the time to generate a full transcript - ugh. So (a) waste your time watching, (b) waste your time writing up a transcript, (c) take the time to post... and (d) everyone has already moved on.

Most video "stories" are for droolers. If you can't write it up, it often isn't worth saying. Exceptions being movies of Pluto, that sort of science-y goodness. I don't think I've ever seen *anything* on the idiot box that was worth a full page of actual cogent explanation. And "interviews".... ffs, just write it down.

Perhaps the new owners will finally fix the massively broken and stupid moderation system that the previous and current owners have left bereft of badly needed attention:

o Moderators can't post with ID. Stupid. Utterly, completely, stupid. Pointless. Ridiculous.o Moderators have zero accountability for what they've done -- only for what they might do latero Absolutely no effective mechanism to remove bad moderation (and that really screws up threads here)o AC's unjustly penalized, many of the site's best posts never rise above the noise levelo Trolls go un-handled -- the AC low-runging is a punt at not having to work at moderation. But it doesn't work.o Perversely limited set of mod types leaves moderators unable to moderate reasonablyo Limits on mod ranges penalize the very best posts (and don't adequately address the trolls, either, because...o On slashdot, troll is effectively equal to AC with one person disagreeing, and...o Because we can't attribute the "disagree" to the mod, it can't be remediated except by the...o Random and future-behavior-only-focused meta moderation system.

And then we have:

o Ridiculous delays between posts for ACs AND for logged-in users. Big convo? Too bad for you.o Inability STILL to handle many character entities after all these years. Not to mention UTF-*8, omg.o Retarded signature limits. C'mon. Bad sigs should be moderated. It takes a lot of chars to use HTML.

And of course there are the short-bus elephants in the room:

o "Editors" that know nothing about editing. Or writing. Or what constitutes a "story"o The "firehose", a way to vote up stuff that won't get posted -- can be a total waste of timeo And the continuous mucking about with the parts that worked, making them NOT work,
while all of the above, which ACTUALLY needs fixing, goes unfixed.

It doesnt matter if those countries get 100 bucks if 99 of them end up going back to cost of manufacturing.

Part of "cost of manufacturing" is paying workers. There and here. So it does matter. When my $100 goes there instead of here, our economy takes a hit. Tiny, sure, but when it's thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of "whatever", then it's no longer a tiny hit.

How do you get shell access on your average Mac without physical access? SSH isn't enabled by default as has been pointed out. In fact, it's been a real PITA to get the versions of OS X I've configured to play nice on the network for the command line. I doubt one user in a thousand has done it -- slashdot mac users not being significantly representative of the average mac users, of course. My macs have SSH available, but the port isn't open to the Intertubes outside of my LAN, so it doesn't concern me very much.